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Genuine work shows
up plagiarizers

"Plagiarism," my prep school teacher wrote in large letters on the board right at the beginning of the school year, as the guiding sermon for the year. Not citing a source and pretending words or ideas were our own meant an "F."

But how would the teacher back in the '60s know that the idea or words were stolen? We had a sense then that the teachers knew all the sources and could easily spot the crime.

That turned out not to be true. After prep school, I found out that the saying "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker" was not written by an eighth-grade classmate, but was stolen from a funny poet named Ogden Nash. Our teacher thought it was original, and the thief got a good grade.

Later, another classmate won a senior year writing contest with a remarkable piece that I knew I certainly could never beat. After graduation, I found she had lifted nearly the whole thing from a witty and provocative writer called Leslie Fiedler who had written stuff on Huckleberry Finn that was too good not to steal.

She probably should have won the contest anyway, for getting away with it. I really was surprised that the teachers who judged the contest didn't know Fiedler. After all, I was a philosophy major, and had found the passage browsing in a book rack at a pharmacy.

The plague of plagiarism has hit journalism and revealed that not only teachers but professional editors can be bluffed too easily.

As for teachers today, the coming of the Internet has made grading essays nearly impossible. The issue now, though, is not trying to win contests with dazzling but passable material, but a fatal lack of curiosity about the world. It is the same general dynamic that assures Newsweek and Time magazines a drop in sales if the cover story is about foreign news.

Yet there is always hope. At our parish school, we had an eighth-grader who was supposed to do a 10-minute report on Japanese immigration to Hawaii. He came to the principal and told her that he couldn't possibly get the report below 25 minutes! The ground rules were an even number of Internet and book sources, with the total number of required references being 10. He had a satchel full of books and a thick notebook of Internet printouts.

When the principal commented on the issue, the young student said she was wrong and flipped through the printouts to cite a page with another opinion. He was supposed to set up a display board to make his points, but insisted that three sides were not enough and he wanted to put a large flip chart to go with the poster boards.

The problem the young man had with the restraints, he explained, was that the three factors contributing to Japanese immigration to Hawaii each had its own history, and he had traced the development of these factors back to the 13th century. He had documented all his sources, and there were plenty.

If our society had more of this kind of citizen, Time and Newsweek would not have to worry about foreign news on the cover, and the New York Times and other papers would have a better chance to spot not only deceit and fraud but sheer American laziness.

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